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Black Scalpel Cityscapes

British artist Damien Hirst has created a new collection of paintings for an exhibition at White Cube Gallery in São Paolo.

For this exhibition, Hirst selected 17 cities, which are either sites of
recent conflict, cities relating to the artist's own life, or centers
of economic, political or religious significance. The selection
includes, Washington DC, Rome, Vatican City,
Leeds, Beijing, Moscow, New York, and London. With the series, Hirst investigates subjects pertaining to the
sometimes-disquieting realities of modern life – surveillance,
urbanisation, globalisation and the virtual nature of conflict – as well
as elements relating to the universal human condition, such as our
inability to arrest physical decay. “Black Scalpel Cityscapes” also make
a metaphorical reference to the military procedure of ‘surgical
bombing’ or ‘surgical strikes’, commonly used in modern warfare, which
aims to limit collateral damage by targeting precise areas for
destruction.

Each city’s particular history is written into its geographical
spread, showing how it has incrementally grown and developed over the
years. The paintings bear witness to Hirst’s trademark technique of
patterning, systematic repetition and grids, as used in earlier series
including the ‘Spot Paintings’, ‘Colour Charts’, ‘Entomology Cabinets’
and the ‘Kaleidoscope Paintings’. This methodology is essentially an
exercise in applying order to chaos, whilst acknowledging that order or
control are often concepts that remain impossibly remote in life.

The suggestion of a remote, digital conflict
inevitably reduces the tragic and devastating realities of war. In a
similarly misleading manner, the perspective of an aerial map minimises
the life beneath it to a series of detached systems and patterns of
collective existence; recalling the imagery used in the films Powers of Ten by Charles and Ray Eames, as well as the compressed, slow
motion, time-lapse footage of US towns in Godfrey Reggio’s cult film Koyaanisqatsi – touchstones in the modern conception of urban living. Hirst’s
paintings, therefore, make inevitable allusions to the all-seeing eye,
that of surveillance tools such as Google Earth, now used by
approximately half a billion people and whose roots are traceable to a
3D mapping application used by US military during the Iraq War.

Hirst
has described the steel scalpels, which have recurred in his work since
the early ‘90s, as ‘dark but at the same time light’, a reference to
the visual appeal of the highly reflective, precision-tooled metal, and
the universal fear of the surgeon’s knife. Playing on elements of
wordplay surrounding ‘surgical strikes’, Hirst here uses them to dissect
not only individual concerns over mortality, but the deep-rooted,
society-wide anxieties over surveillance, the digitisation of warfare
and the sense of a remote Orwellian order and its imposition on our
individuality.